Saturday, January 25, 2014

If a theory (or belief system) is slipperier than an eel, maybe it's just bullshit...

Your maxim of the day, foul language
and all. Growing up in a very religious, strongly right-wing,
conservative world, I have often had the misfortune of listening to
people spout utter nonsense, and then twist themselves into logical
pretzels to maintain those irrational stances when confronted with
reasonable counter arguments.

The Biblical genocide argument is
always “fun”, for instance.

The Bible's accounts of genocide
weren't really genocide.

How is wiping out entire people's
not genocide?

Okay,
they were genocides, but it was merited. God gave the massacred
people's lands to Israel, therefore it was just. So God is
above his own laws? He can kill people to take their stuff, and that
somehow is not murder?
Well, of course God wouldn't wipe out
a civilization to steal the inhabitant's land; they were bad people!
Even the babies? What about the fetuses (because, we all know
that those are “people”...)? Thelittle kids?
Why
do you hate God so much?!?

It's
like off the cuff hermeneutics. But these slippery eel type arguments
transcend religion, and find a hallowed place in our political arena.
I'm sorry, a niche of batshittery in the political circus. The longer
you argue, the more you see that your opponent is playing a game of
logical hopscotch: as soon as one line falls, they have another, and
then another, and another. Oftentimes, you'll see that the lines are
either ill suited to exist in conjunction with one another, or else
completely contradict one another. The arguer will do anything, no
matter how poor an overall argument it makes, to “prove” a
sufficient number of little points, here and there, in order to
convince themselves that the main point is valid; and as soon as one
point is knocked down, they will move onto the next. There is a lot
of completely unjustified “connect the dots” type thinking
(“People died in Benghazi. Obama deliberately killed those
people!”), but this doesn't much matter either, because they are
absolutely convinced of the conclusion. The premises and inferences
that lead them to it are negotiable. In other words, we're talking
about belief, belief
attempting to find validation through the use of reason. But reason
is tangential to, not central to, the argument. Reason is simply a
tool with which to convince other people of and placate their own
intellect regarding the belief; but the belief exists and persists
regardless of reason.

Often,
the tiny points seem (and even are) logical. This is the trap, the
twisted beauty, of the strategy, though. The Sean Hannity's of the
world don't win people to their side by feeding them an exclusive
diet of bullshit. They win people to their side by presenting them
with random facts, and then making bullshit inferences, like a
connect-the-dots picture of duplicity. Yes, President Obama is black;
and, yes, he has discussed racism. But, short of some damned
compelling evidence to the contrary, you can't just assert that he is
a racist. The thing is, that damned compelling evidence is
never forthcoming. Those reasonable premises are presented as if they
are the inference. In fact,
suggesting that a person talking in a mature, polite fashion about
wrongs they've encountered is racism is just batshit crazy. But if
you question the inference, the argument almost always comes back to
the premise, or some other equally unconnected premise. It's very
much shifting the goal posts...any time one line falls, just move
onto a new position. And, maybe, loop back around eventually, because
why not?

As tempting as it
is, it's oftentimes an ineffective strategy to take umbrage with the
subpoints – even when they're god awful (like “Obama's a fascist
socialist communist dictator!”). If they don't hit you with the one
tactic, they'll hit you with another: if they lose the subpoint,
they'll move onto another one, and you'll be stuck in an endless
hopscotch game, leaping from tangential point to tangential point;
and, if the subpoint was valid, there's obviously no point arguing
it. In fact, right or wrong, as far as the overall argument is
concerned, if the inferences are horrible, then the premises don't
much matter. The premise that Obama is a Christmas hating socialist
is logically less problematic than the inference that brings us to
alien existence.

At the end of the
day, though, if a belief system requires ample mental gymnastics
simply to be consistent; if believers have to invent a field like
hermeneutics to cook up interpretations that seem less insane than
the obvious and accepted meanings; if they have to constantly shift
the goal posts or hop from one point to another to convince
themselves that the argument has a leg to stand on...maybe it's time
to take a long, hard look at that belief. Because, the slipperier an
argument, the more often it seems that it – or at least the reason
for believing it – is just bullshit.